Distinguished from the more usual and direct
means by which artists express their inspirations and appeal to the
sympathies of men, distinct from the common language of Art, which
contents itself with conveying merely local and individual ideas,
abstract lines are recognized as the grand hieroglyphic symbolism of the
aggregate of human thought, the artistic manifestations of the great
human Cosmos. The natural world, passing through the mind of man, is
immediately interpreted and humanized by his creative power, and assumes
the colors, forms, and harmonies of Painting, Sculpture, and Music. But
abstract lines, as we find them in Architecture and in the ceramic arts,
are the independent developments of this creative power, coming directly
from humanity itself, and obtaining from the outward world only the most
distant motives of composition. Thus it is an inevitable deduction that
Architecture is the most _human_ of all arts, and its lines the most
_human_ of all lines.
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever";
and the affectionate devotion with which this gift is received by
finite intelligences from the hand of God is expressed in Art, when its
infinite depth _can_ be so expressed at all, in a twofold language,--
the one objective, the other subjective; the one recalling the immediate
source of the emotion, and presenting it palpably to the senses, arrayed
in all the ineffable tenderness of Art, which is Love,--the other,
portraying rather the emotion than the cause of it, and by an
instinctive and universal symbolism expressing the deep and serious joy
with which the "thing of beauty" is welcomed to the heart.
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